Stephen Haseler

Haseler is Professor of Government (since 1986) at London Metropolitan University and Director of the Global Policy Institute. He taught at Georgetown University as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and George Mason University, and holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Maryland-Baltimore. He is also a Senior Research Fellow, The Federal Trust.

In 1983 Haseler was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and writinge for Commentary on the ‘great European missile debate’, and was co-organiser of Youth Section of Campaign for Democratic Socialism, a pressure group which operated within the Labour Party in the early 1960s and included Dick Taverne, Bill Rodgers, Professor George Jones and Lord Donoughue.

In Haseler’s (2004) Super-state: The New Europe and Its Challenge to America, (p.xi) he states his influences:

I have had the great fortune over the years to be able to hone my analysis on both sides of the Atlantic in the company of some real experts. Mark Falcoff, Elliot Abrams (now White House special advisor), Richard Perle, Herb Levine, Edwin J. Feulner (President of the Heritage Foundation), Peter Rodman (now Deputy Assistant Secretary of State), Bill Schneider (Member of the Defence Policy Board), Bruce Weinrod, Charles Horner, Ben Wattenberg, Sven Kraemer, Michael Ledeen, former Ambassador Robert Hunter and former national Security Advisor Richard Allen (now of the CSIS, where, in the 1980s, whilst it was the Georgetown Centre for Strategic and International Studies, I was a fellow), John O’ Sullivan (editor of the influential wasington journal The National Interest) and Kendall Myers (of the US State Department).

Haseler obtained his doctorate at the London School of Economics (1963). He was a key member of the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies and with fellow IEDSS members, Gerald Frost and Alan Lee Williams he is also a member of The European Atlantic Movement. In 1988 Neville Sandelson (also one of the founding members of the SDP) and Haseler co-founded the Radical Society, a cross-party forum for debate on political and other issues. Sandelson wrote the foreword for Peter Shipley’s (1983) ‘The Militant Tendency: Trotskyism in the Labour Party’, which was emblematic of the victimisation that he and Haseler (and a group which included Reg Prentice) felt at the hands of what they nade it known they regarded as left-wing extremists. According to his papers Sandelson also possesed pamphlets and papers concerning the activities of extreme left-wing organisations within and outwith the Labour Party, including:

*The Hidden Face of the Labour Party, August 1974.

*Not to be Trusted: Left Wing Extremism in the Labour and Liberal Parties, by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, February 1974.

*Trotskyists, Marxists and the SWP, by Mike Thomas MP, article in the Journal, 2 March 1978.

*Dealing with the Marxist Threat to Industry, by Roger Rosewell, undated.

*Studies of the Left no.2: The Communist Party of Great Britain – Freedom’s Foremost Enemy, by Graham Mather, undated. (Mather was to go on to become a member of Demos).

*The Price of Peace: a Plain Man’s Guide to Current Defence Issues, by Brian Crozier, 1980.

*Politics Today no. 13: Extremism and the Left, by Peter Shipley (A Conservative Research Department paper), July 1981.

At the time of the formation of the SDP, Haseler was involved with the Social Democratic Alliance, which was formed with the help of Brian Crozier, with the intention of drawing away votes from the Labour Party in the 1979 election. Haseler hsd previously floated the idea (and old political tactic) in publications such as the (1980) Towards a Centre Party? article in Encounter. Press releases and other material produced by the Social Democratic Alliance, include an article ‘The Mutation of Labour’ listing details of extremist Labour MPs and their activities, and that Militant’s infiltration of the Labour Party was strongly connected with the possible need for a new centre party. Sandelson was Vice-Chairman of the SDP Friends of Israel group, the Drunken Hare Club for MPs and peers interested in defence.

The Radical Society also involved Arthur Seldon (who would also advise Demos along with others from the Institute of Economic Affairs). The first issue of its magazine ‘The Radical: the Journal of the Radical Society’, September 1989, was edited by Sandelson, Stephen Haseler and Arthur Seldon. This contained the following articles:

‘Europe: the Way Ahead’ by Sir Geoffrey Howe,
‘Reforming the Welfare State’ by David Green,
‘Radical and Uncongenial Reform in Priorities’ by Brian Walden,
‘Keep Pace with the People’ by Arthur Seldon,
‘Trade Unions and a Changing Society’ by Eric Hammond,
‘Take Heed’ by Jo Grimond,
‘There Are Votes in the New Radicalism’ by Stephen Haseler,
‘Labour’s Sham Prospectus’ by Neville Sandelson,
‘Trade Union Policy’ by Frank Chapple,
‘The 6th of June 45 Years On’ by Norman Tebbit,
‘The Radical Agenda for the 1990s’ by Martin Holmes,
‘1688-1789-1992′ by Norman Stone, and
‘Modernising the Honours System’ by David Carlton.

The Radical also seems to have had some connection with the early formation of the Social Market Foundation, and the Committee for a Free Britain and was funded (after an appeal) by James Goldsmith who gave £10,000.

According to Tom Easton in Lobster 31:

Haseler was not only a member of the SDP, but a founding member of the Social Democratic Alliance which preceded it. An academic who, as a London councillor, had become a vociferous critic of changes within the Labour Party in the Seventies, Haseler had spent some time at the third big Washington think-tank, the Heritage Foundation. With its money he had helped set up in London the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, a forceful and well-resourced foe of both the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Labour Party in the Eighties.

Haseler may not be as important a figure in starting the SDP as Brian Crozier claims in his (1993) Free Agent (p.147) , but he had a considerable transatlantic role before and during the life of the SDP. According to Phil Kelly (1981) An Unholy Alliance, The Leveller 52:

Haseler works for the US National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) founded in 1962 by William J Casey now appointed by Reagan to head the CIA. NSIC is a pressure group for militant anti-communism and is at the centre of a vast network of front organisations. One of its main activities, Casey told the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on his CIA appointment, has been the buiIding of academic respectability for the practice of intelligence. It has helped to sponsor more than 200 professorial chairs and teaching posts in US universities and colleges devoted to teaching and researching intelligence. NSIC provided some of the cash used by journalist and CIA contract employee Brian Crosier [sic] to transform his news agency forum World Features, a CIA front organisation into the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). Haseler works for the NSIC’s ‘left face’, the Advisory Committee on European Democracy and Security (ACEDS), which published his book, Eurocommunism. Co-author of the work was NSIC’s Dr Roy Godson, director of the International Labor Programme at Georgetown University in Washington DC. This institution has been a centre of cold war sentiment among US intellectuals, and many of itsstaff now find themselves in the Reagan administration. According to Haseler and Godson, Eurocommunism is nothing more than a Soviet ploy to detach western Europe from the U.S. without a war.

We can see this ‘left face’ set out in Andrew Gamble’s (1982) The Rise and Rise of the SDP in Marxism Today. Gamble protests that the “most complacent and ill-founded response on the Left” is to dismiss the SDP as a media creation, “a conspiracy against Labour” designed to stop the election of a Left Labour government. He states that:

One wing in the SDP around Stephen Haseler and the Social Democratic Alliance, want the party to become a populist Roy Jenkins manages to convey the impression that he is Prime Minister already working class party. Its heroes are former leaders of the Labour Right, like George Brown, Ray Gunter and Bob Mellish. Such a party would be fiercely anti-intellectual and anti-socialist, and would seek to express directly what it believes is the unrepresented consensus of working class opinion, a consensus which is in favour of collectivist redistributive measures to secure workers’ living standards, but strongly opposed to liberal policies on immigration and capital and corporal punishment. All this is combined with an aggressively nationalistic and pro-Western (although not pro EEC) foreign policy.

Chilton Williamson’s (1986) National Review, March 28 review of Haseler’s ‘Anti-Americanism’ notes that it was published in the US by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, with a 386-word foreword by Midge Decter, and in which Haseler concludes that:

…anti-Americanism is essentially a reaction, not to America nor even to bourgeois capitalism, but to the idea of democratic society itself.

According to Williamson, Haseler begins by identifying what anti-Americanism is not, most of these manifestations are ‘bogus’, Anti-Americanism is not the basis of policy disputes between the US and its allies; it is not an ‘honest re-assessments by “foreign publics and elites”‘:

In its crudest form, anti-Americanism (“primitive anti-Americanism”) is no more than resentment, based on envy and masquerading as moral indignation at “American imperialism.” Even at this level, of course, Marxist-Leninist ideology is at work, yet it is a fig-leaf only, a vain disguise and a pretext: Nobody, Haseler argues in his chapter “The Demise of Communist Anti-Americanism,” believes any longer in either the moral or the technical supremacy of the Soviet Union in particular or Communism in general. Paradoxically, however, “As the ideology of Communism dies, anti-Americanism becomes simply destructive, critical, and bitter, and such negativism becomes an ideology in itself.”

Despite the syndrome being chimeric “Even so it remains the dominant intellectual framework of much of the Western and Westernized intelligentsia.” Haseler is described as a “sympathetic Englishman”, offering the advice that: “Americans should no longer care about being liked. They should seek to be trusted and respected instead.” Haseler also wrote the (1986) Anti-Americanism: Steps on a Dangerous Path, for the IEDSS, and some analysis of the literature on defining anti-Americanism argues that most of the contributions are of American origin and so these definitions are cultivated in an American way of thinking and perception. This also has a psycho-social dimension, Haseler argues:

Dependence, and particularly the consciousness of such dependence, can easily become a negative and corrosive experience, in which the dependent partner simply flails at the protector.

Other revues of ‘Anti-Americanism,’ such as Brendon O’Conner’s A Brief History of Anti-Americanism: From Cultural Criticism to Terrorism finds Haseler’s (1985) The varieties of anti-Americanism, ‘lacking in balance’ and a work “which counsels America to largely ignore the criticisms of foreigners (whom Haseler principally sees as being envious of America’s global power). “

*Back to the The Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies